A former senior member of a yoga ashram at the centre of a sex abuse inquiry said the leader of the movement plotted to kill her because she wanted to go public with allegations of abuse.

The woman, given the name Shishy, was second in charge at the Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain on the NSW central coast in the 1970s and 80s.

The Royal Commission has heard that a whistleblower ''would be best dead''.

In her statement, tendered to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, she said she went to India to alert the movement's leader, Swami Satyananda Saraswati, of the abuse.

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According to her statement, he and the movement's current leader Swami Niranjan Saraswati discussed disposing of her.

"They discussed what a great danger to … the organisation I was - that I was trouble, and that, 'it would be best if she ended up floating downriver on the Ganga (Ganges River)'," her statement read.

"I took that to mean I would be best dead."

The commission heard Shishy took the sex abuse claims about the Mangrove Mountain ashram's leader, Swami Akhandananda, to the NSW police and later learned he was trying to arrange her to be killed.

Shishy said she was under Akhandananda's complete control over Shishy and she believed his violence towards her and his sexual abuse of children was for their own good.

She told the commission that he would gouge her moles out with a knife and she had to sew the wounds up with fishing wire as there was no medical treatment offered.

Now aged 57, Shishy told the commission Akhandananda would insert a double-barrelled shotgun in her vagina, leaving her terrified.

"I felt like if I moved or did anything other than receive it . . . I wasn't 100 per cent sure he wouldn't fully pull the trigger," she said.

The commission heard she was forced to drink the urine of Akhandananda and Satyananda to avoid getting pregnant to them but ended up having two abortions, one at a clinic and the other self-administered.

When she refused to have sex with a 14-year-old boy on Akhandananda's orders, the swami sliced her vagina with a pair of scissors. She went on to have a sexual relationship with the boy, known as APQ, and later had a daughter with him.

Shishy told the commission she had about 15 children in her care at the ashram and admitted using physical discipline on them but denied subjecting them to violent beatings.

She told the commission she was aware Akhandananda was having sex with at least two child residents but did not initially report the abuse. She left the ashram in 1985.

Evidence before the commission showed that after leaving the ashram Shishy tried to apologise to former child residents and she wept as she told the hearing, "I am not the monster as portrayed."

Central Coast psychiatrist Sandra Smith told the commission she saw Akhandananda dangle her four-year-old son over a well by the ankles but thought he was being playful. She described the ashram as a "cult" with an all-powerful leader.

Akhandananda was convicted over the abuse in 1989 but his conviction was overturned in 1991. He died from alcoholism in 1997. Satyananda died in 2009.